Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia

Chapter 3: Khirbet Qeiyafa in the Period of King David

Ancient cities of the biblical period did not include public areas comparable to the central forum in Roman cities, the piazza in medieval European cities, or the shopping malls of modern cities. Instead, the gate area was the heart of the city, as everyone who entered or left the city had to pass through it.

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The city gate was where elders of the town sat and passed judgment on disputes brought before them.

Importance of the city gates

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Movement through this inner gate could have been controlled, so that possibly not everyone who was allowed into the piazza could then proceed further into the city.

I’m reminded of theater design in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in which lobbies are meant to physically hold everyone in a public space before they’re let into the actual theater space inside.

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Tabun is an Arabic term referring to round overns used for baking, measuring around 0.5-1m (1 1/2-3 1/4 ft) in diameter and generally constructed of earth, though occasionally from a circle of rounded stones.

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…four large stone steps (a rare find in itself, as built stone steps are seldom uncovered in excavations) descended into the main room.

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To the best of our knowledge, drainage channels have not been reported in ordinary dwellings in biblical period cities–only in the city gates–so this came as a surprise.

“To the best of our knowledge” –I like the warning/caution they give here, though most may gloss over it. Small statements like this are small flags in the text that scholars should note for potential future research. Subtle flags like this pop up in math textbooks frequently, but often only the well-trained know to take advantage of them.

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This demonstrates how the understanding of archaeological remains can change as an excavation progresses.

Another archaeology 101 example here. Keep in mind that something that may look one way at a point in the research may change fundamentally as one “digs” further.

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A bench stood next to the entrance–a feature found only in cultic rooms.

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…which we interpreted as a stable.

again another cautionary flag that might possibly take other interpretations.

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One room (G) is unusual: it contained a bench…

G doesn’t seem to actually be labeled on diagram C3, but does appear on Fig. 28 of building C10

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Pillared buildings are well known from the period of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel and were used as public storehouses for the produce collected as tax from farmers. The existence of such a building at Khirbet Qeiyafa clearly indicates central authority and administration.

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We know that in ancient times urgent messages were communicated over great distances by sending signals using fire or torches. Evidence of this practice in the Kingdom of Judah comes from an inscription on a pottery sherd from Lachish from the time when Nebuchadnezzar was besieging the city: “we are watching for the fire signals of Lachish according to all the signs which my lord has given. The palace at Khirbet Qeiyafa would ahve been an ideal place for sending and receiving such torch-signals.

Nice documentation in the archaeological record for early long distance communication

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…we can three phases of development in cities in Judah in the biblical period (Fig. 33).

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Khirbet Qeiyafa was probably the first site constructed according to this plan. [urban planning in Israel involving a casemate wall with houses that incorporate the casemates as rooms. Several examples from the following centuries exist using a similar pattern.]

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The excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa thus reveal another important aspect of the historical figure of David, and show that not only did he build cities, but also that a new concept of urban planning emerged during his reign.

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… the city was built in several major phases. In the first phase, the site was cleared of earlier settlement remains and bedrock was exposed around the future city. In the second phase, stones were quarried and brought up to the line of the city wall. […] In the third pahse, the builders began work on the gates and their chambers. […] Construction of the wall itself commenced in the fourth phase. […] In the fifth and final phase, the private houses whose walls incorporated the casemates were constructed.

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This was a good demonstration that the chronological dilemma cannot be resolved on the basis of pottery alone.

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In the 2008 season we had discovered carbonized olive pits in the city wall and in rooms of the destroyed buildings in Area B.

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The enormous tension that accompanied sending the samples via express mail resulted in the credit card with which we paid for the shipment being mistakenly packed inisde and sent to the laboratory at Oxford, along with the olive pits.

This could be a great plot point in a thriller version of this story!One might think that with multiple samples, they might send them separately, that way if some are lost, then at least they’ve not lost everything!

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A discovery made in our 2011 excavation season […] A jar containing some 20 olive pits was found in the destroyed city. […] which clearly indicate that the city had been destroyed no later than 980 to 970 BCE. […} Today, the dating […] is based on nearly 30 samples, probably the best radiometric dating we have so far for any level in a biblical city.

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…determining the dates of the reigns of the kings of Israel and Judah is not a simple task, and the length of those of David and Solomon, exactly 40 years each, appears to be a literary device rather than reflecting historical reality. We therefore propose that the round number of 1000 BCE as the date of David’s accession to the through, though this is merely an approximation. […] But it is clear from the radiocarbon determinations that Khirbet Qeiyafa can be dated to the time of David or Saul, but no to Solomon’s reign, which is later than the results obtained. It will only be possible to decide conclusively if an inscription naming one king or another is found at Khirbet Qeiyafa. To be scientifically cautious, we accept the later date, to the reign of King David.

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The “excavation dump” is the term commonly used by archaeologists in referring to the piles of earth and stones that they remove from the ground during excavation.

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In 2007 it was possible to claim that nothing was known archaeologically about King David; ten years later the situation is very different, and archaeology can present two sites from his period in the Judean Shephelah.

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Guide to highlight colors

Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category belowOrange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare wordGreen–Reference to readBlue–Interesting QuoteGray–Typography ProblemRed–Example to work through

Shindig is a turnkey solution for online video chat events. Its unique technology offers the dynamics of an in-person event at internet scale. Shindig enables a host to give a video conference, lecture, seminar, interview or media event in front of an online audience of thousands. Hosts can share the stage for face-to-face interactions with audience members before the entire gathering or sidebar with participants privately. Meanwhile, unlike other video conference or webinar meeting technologies, audience members themselves are also able to network, discuss and socialize with one another in their own self initiated private video chats just as they would naturally at in person events. Prominent organizations and individuals ranging from CNN, The Economist, Forbes and Conde Nast Publications to Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg and Jim Cramer are among Shindig's early adopters.

In 1996, Paulina Borsook wrote a story that, frankly, really pissed me off. In "Cyberselfish," published in Mother Jones and eventually turned into a book, she wrote about how new have-it-your-way technology was creating a generation of spoiled brats with computers.
I took umbrage. Not only was I a proud member of the generation she was lambasting (a generation that is now oldschool on the internet, for whatever that's worth), but I had personally observed just the opposite. I witnessed people using new digital tools to collaborate. I saw more selflessness and altruism online than off.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

I think the internet’s core message can be summed up in one word: Share. ❧

An early reference to the sharing economy?October 04, 2018 at 09:08AM

The last thing most people need is another microphone. They need something to say. (And time to say it.) ❧

Interesting to hear this from 2006 and looking back now…October 04, 2018 at 09:12AM

Thoughts about Drupal 9 release timelines, including how this might impact Drupal 7, Drupal 8 and even Drupal 10.

Interesting to watch the hows and whys of the ways open source projects plan their releases. I wish that WordPress had more outward communication like this for big releases and projects like Gutenberg. Transparent and open communication can sure help a lot of potential problems.

If you had asked me years ago when I started my website/blog if I’d ever have over a few hundred comments or reactions to the content on it, I would have said you were crazy. Today, with the help of Webmention and tools like Brid.gy, I’ve just passed the 9,000 reactions mark (and added many new friends in the process)!

I’ll send along special thanks to simple open web standards and the IndieWeb community for vastly improving my online communication.

The world exploded into a whirling network of kinships, where everything pointed to everything else, everything explained everything else.

— Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

I wasn’t able to attend the original presentation, but I think it’s even more valuable to listen to it all alone rather than in what was assuredly a much larger crowd. There is a wonderful presence in this brief history of the internet, made all the more intriguing by Jeremy’s performance as if it were poetry about technology. I find that he’s even managed to give it an interesting structured format, which, in many senses, mirrors the web itself.

I hope that if you’re starting your adventure on the web, that you manage to find this as one of the first links that starts you off on your journey. It’s a great place to start.

The English language has evolved dramatically throughout its lifespan, to the extent that a modern speaker of Old English would be incomprehensible without translation. One concrete indicator of this process is the movement from irregular to regular (-ed) forms for the past tense of verbs. In this study we quantify the extent of verb regularization using two vastly disparate datasets: (1) Six years of published books scanned by Google (2003--2008), and (2) A decade of social media messages posted to Twitter (2008--2017). We find that the extent of verb regularization is greater on Twitter, taken as a whole, than in English Fiction books. Regularization is also greater for tweets geotagged in the United States relative to American English books, but the opposite is true for tweets geotagged in the United Kingdom relative to British English books. We also find interesting regional variations in regularization across counties in the United States. However, once differences in population are accounted for, we do not identify strong correlations with socio-demographic variables such as education or income. [.pdf]

A groundbreaking resource for those who need to deliver a memorable message introduces six key principles that help make messages stick--simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions, and stories--and explains how to incorporate each of these factors into the creative thought process. 100,000 first printing.

An awesome and quick read. I love that in some sense, they actually use their own advice when writing this to make some of their own ideas a bit more sticky. I thought this was a good little read and provides some interesting and very useful and actionable ideas. Definitely worth reviewing over some of the ideas in the near future for some writing I have in mind. I’d definitely recommend it to marketing people and communicators. I’d also love to delve further into some of their references.

Finally publishing this publicly with all the Highlights, Quotes, Marginalia, etc.

Reading Progress

12/28/17 marked as: want to read; “This seemed interesting in the library when I browsed by, so I picked it up. Seems a quick/easy read. Covers some interesting material related to ars memorativa which I may find interesting. They also make some references to schema within Hollywood, so that may be useful too.”

Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia

Or is it possible to make a true, worthwhile idea circulate as effectively as this false idea?

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How many times have I thought of this very topic?Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning

When we get advice on communicating, it often concerns our delivery: “Stand up straight, make eye contact, use appropriate hand gestures. Practice, practice, practice (but don’t sound canned).” Sometimes we get advice about structure “Tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em. Tell ’em, then tell ’em what you told ’em.” Or “Start by getting their attention–tell a joke or a story.”
Another genre concerns knowing your audience: “know what your listeners care about so you can tailor your communication to them.” And, finally, there’s the most common refrain in the realm of communication advice: Use repetition, repetition, repetition.

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The common refrains, many of which can be useless.Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning

Which way will stick? And how do you know in advance?

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This can be the holy grail of teaching…Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning

What makes urban legends so compelling? […] Why does virtually every society circulate a set of proverbs? Why do some political ideas circulate widely while others fall short?

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Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning

This book is a complement to The Tipping Point [by Malcolm Gladwell] in the sense that it will identify the traits that make ideas sticky, a subject that was beyond the scope of Gladwell’s book.

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Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning

Researchers discovered something shocking about the candy-tampering epidemic: It was a myth.

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I’ve always suspected that this was the case but never saw any evidence or reportage that back up this common Halloween myth. In fact, I recall taking candy to local hospitals for radio-graphic exams.Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning

In other words, the best social science evidence reveals that taking candy from strangers is perfectly okay. It’s your family you should worry about.

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Introduction: Six Principles of Sticky Ideas

Both stories highlighted an unexpected danger in a common activity: eating Halloween candy and eating movie popcorn. Both stories called for simple action […] both made use of vivid, concrete images that cling easily to memory […] and both stories tapped into emotion: [fear… disgust…]

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Many of these strike a cord from my memory training, which I suspect plays a tremendous part. Particularly the vividly clear and concrete details.Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning

There is no “formula” for a sticky idea–we don’t want to overstate the case. But sticky ideas do draw from a common set of traits, which make them more likely to succeed.

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… we an genetically engineer our players. We can create ideas with an eye to maximizing their stickiness.

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This isn’t far from my idea of genetically engineering memes when I read Dawkins back in the day…Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning

Simplicity […] Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound.

This seems to be the forthcoming core of the book.Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning

It’s not as though there’s a powerful constituency for overcomplicated, lifeless prose.

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Sadly, there is a villain in our story. The villain is a natural psychological tendency that consistently confounds our ability to create ideas using these principles. It’s called the Curse of Knowledge.

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The example they give of the [music] Tappers and Listeners is great to illustrate the Curse of Knowledge.Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning

You can’t unlearn what you already know. There are, in fact, only two ways to beat the Curse of Knowledge reliably. The first is not to learn anything. The second is to take your ideas and transform them.

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The JFK pitch to get a man on the moon was a great example here.Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning

Introduction: Systematic Creativity

They found that 89 percent of the award-winning ads could be classified into six basic categories, or templates. […] (For the other templates,
see the endnotes.) […] Amazingly, when the researchers tried to classify these “less successful” ads, they could classify only 2 percent of them [using the previous 6 categories]. […] It appears that there are indeed systematic ways to produce creative ideas.

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This is some very interesting data. I should track this reference down. Particularly when they did the follow up of training groups in these methods (or not) and realizing that those with the templates did far better with minimal training.Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning

Chapter 1: Simple

The [Army] plans often turn out to be useless.
“The trite expression we always use is No plan survives contact with the enemy,” says Colonel Tom Kolditz, the head of the behavioral sciences division at West Point.
“You may start off trying to fight your plan, but the enemy gets a vote. Unpredictable things happen–the weather changes, a key asset is destroyed, the enemy responds in a way you don’t expect.

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aka Complexity…Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning

So, in the 1980’s the Army adapted its planning process, inventing a concept called Commander’s Intent (CI).

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The way to plan around complexity to some extent.Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning

It’s hard to make ideas stick in a noisy, unpredictable, chaotic environment. If we’re to succeed, the first step is this: Be simple. […]
What we mean by “simple” is finding the core of the idea. […] Finding the core is analogous to writing the Commander’s Intent.

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Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning

The French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery once offered a definition of engineering elegance: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

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Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning

Highlight (yellow) – Chapter 1: Simple > Pages 28-46

Some interesting examples in the sections on “Finding the Core at Southwest Airlines”, “Burying the Lead”, “If you Say Three Things, You Don’t Say Anything.”, and “Decision Paralysis”Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning

A great way to avoid useless accuracy, and to dodge the Curse of Knowledge, is to use analogies. Analogies derive their power from schemas:
A pomelo is like a grapefruit. A good news story is structured like a pyramid.

I’m not sure of the background of the actual pitch, but a little massaging really makes E.T. the tried and true story of a boy and his dog, but this time the dog is an alien! So again, it really is an analogy to another prior film, namely Lassie!Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning

Good metaphors are “generative.” The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate “new perceptions,
explanations, and inventions.”

Evil twin indeed. There’s nothing artistic about their work at all.Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning

Chapter 2 Unexpected

And if a well-designed message can make people applaud for a safety announcement there’s hope for all of us.

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Most of the time, though, we can’t demand attention; we must attract it.

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The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern. Humans adapt incredibly quickly to consistent patterns. Consistent sensory timulation makes us tune out[…]

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Our brain is designed to be keenly aware of changes.

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This chapter focuses on two essential questions: How do I get people’s attention? And, just as crucially, How do I keep it?

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…we have to understand two essential emotions–surprise and interest–[…]

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And minivans deliver kids to soccer practice. No one dies, ever.

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Our schemas are like guessing machines. Schemas help us predict what will happen and, consequently , how we should make decisions.

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Emotions are elegantly tuned to help us deal with critical situations. They prepare us for different ways of acting and thinking.

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For instance, a secondary effect of being angry … is that we become more certain of our judgements. When we’re angry, we know we’re right, as anyone who has been in a relationship can attest.

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When our guessing machines fail, surprise grabs our attention so that we can repair them for the future.

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In a book called Unmasking the Face, Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen coined the term, “the surprise brow,” …

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When our brows go up, it widens our eyes and gives us a broader field of vision–the surprise brow is our body’s way of forcing us to see more.

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…when we’re angry our eyes narrow so we can focus on a known problem. In addition to making our eyebrows rise, surprise causes our jaws to drop and our mouths to gape. We’re struck momentarily speechless. Our bodies temporarily stop moving and our muscles go slack. It’s as though our bodies want to ensure that we’re not talking or moving when we ought to be taking in new information.

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Researchers who study conspiracy theories, for instance, have noted that many of them arise when people are grappling with unexpected events, such as when the young and attractive die suddenly. […] There tends to be less conspiratorial interest in the sudden deaths of ninety-year olds.

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What we see now is that surprise isn’t enough. We also need insight. But, to be satisfying, surprise must be “post-dictable.”

Highlight (yellow) – Section Hension and Phraug > page 70-71

Added on January 16, 2018

So, a good process for making your ideas stickier is: (1) Identify the central message you need to communicate–find the core; (2) Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message–i.e., What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isnt it already happening naturally? (3) Comjmunicate your message in a way that breaks your audience’s guessing machines along the critical counterintuitive dimension. Then, once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines.

Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages. […] It’s your job, as a communicator, to expose the parts of your message that are uncommon sense.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Hension and Phraug > page 72

this could be done for the typical romantic ads about having a baby being a special time of life that’s cute and you don’t want to miss. really it’s traumatic and potentially life threatening and fragile. You HAVE to stop to re-adjust to your new life or you may end up losing your new precious someone (or worse, yourself.) Example is a California PSA ad that I heard on 3/13/18 on the radio.Added on January 16, 2018

To make a message stick, you’ve got to push it beyond common sense to uncommon sense.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Tire Chains at Nordstrom > page 74

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“The lead to the story is ‘There will be no school next Thursday.‘”

Highlight (yellow) – Section Journalism 101 > page 76

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“But,” says [social psychologist Robert] Cialdini, “I also found something I had not expected–the most successful of these pieces [scientists writing for an audience of non-scientists] all began with a mystery story.”

Mysteries are powerful, Cialdini says, because they create a need for closure. […] Cialdini began to create mysteries in his own classroom, and the power of the approach quickly became clear. He would introduce the mystery at the start of class, return to it during the lecture, and reveal the answer at the end.

Sol Golomb used to do this with brain teasers at the start of class, presumably to catch the attention of bored students who could puzzle on it during class. I also suspected he used it to help identify creative thinkers and students smarter than their classwork might indicate.Added on January 16, 2018

Mystery is created not from an unexpected moment but from an unexpected journey. […] A schema violation is a onetime transaction. […] We would call it “first-level” unexpectedness. […]we’re asked to follow on a journey whose ending is unpredictable. That’s second-level unexpectedness. In this way, we jump from fleeting surprise to enduring interest.

[Robert] McKee says, “Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations.” […] In McKee’s view, a great script is designed so that every scene is a Turning Point. “Each Turning Point hooks curiosity. the audience wonders, What will happen next? and How will it turn out?

In 1994, George Loewenstein, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University, provided the most comprehensive account of situational interest. It is surprisingly simple. Curiosity, he says, happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The “Gap Theory” of Curiosity > page 84

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Pokemon cards cause kids to wonder, Which characters am I missing?

One important implication of the gap theory is that we need to open gaps before we close them. Our tendency is to tell people the facts. First, though, they must realize that they need these facts. The trick to convincing people that they need our message, according to Loewenstein, is to first highlight some specific knowledge that they’re missing. We can pose a question or puzzle that confronts people with a gap in their knowledge. We can point out that someone else knows something that they don’t. We can present them with situations that have unknown resolutions, such as elections, sports events, or mysteries. We can challenge them to predict an outcome (which creates two knowledge gaps–What will happen? and Was I right?.

As an example, most local news programs run teaser ads for upcoming broadcasts. […] These are sensationalist examples of the gap theory. They work because they tease you with something tat you don’t know–in fact, something that you didn’t care about at all, until you found out that you didn’t know it.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The “Gap Theory” of Curiosity > page 85

Added on January 16, 2018

The improvement here is driven by structure, not content. Let’s face it, this is not a particularly interesting mystery.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The “Gap Theory” of Curiosity > page 87

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Research has shown that we are typically overconfident about how much we know.

The average participant failed to identify more than 70 percent of the best solutions identified by an expert panel. This failure is understandable; we wouldn’t expect any one person to be able to generate a database worth of solutions. However, when the individuals were asked to assess their own performance, they predicted that they had identified 75 percent. They thought they got the majority, but in reality they’d missed them.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Battling Overconfidence > page 88

He’s set up his own mystery here… What are the others? (ways to reduce demand for parking example)Added on January 16, 2018

Eric Mazur, a physics professor at Harvard, came up with a pedagogical innovation known as “concept testing”. Every so often in his classes, Mazur will pose a conceptual question and then ask his students to vote publicly on the answer. The simple act of committing to an answer makes the students more engaged and more curious about the outcome.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Battling Overconfidence > page 89

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Overconfident people are more likely to recognize a knowledge gap when they realize that others disagree with the. Nancy Lowry and David Johnson [study] one grou, the discussion was led in a way that fostered a consensus. With the second group, the discussion was designed to produce disagreements about the right answer.

Students who achieved easy consensus were less interested in the topic, studied less, and were less likely to visit the library to get additional information.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Battling Overconfidence > page 89

think about this in terms of politics with the right versus the left and the effects on the public and news.Added on January 16, 2018

Curiosity comes from gaps in our knowledge.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Gaps Start with Knowledge > page 90

Example of ABC’s NCAA football games and Roone Arledge memo about setting the stage for gamesAdded on January 16, 2018

Questions about biology early on pushed me personally…Added on January 16, 2018

Chapter 3 Concrete

Abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and to remember it. It also makes it harder to coordinate our activities with others, who may interpret the abstraction in different ways. Concreteness helps us to avoid these problems.

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Not good for mathematics then is it?Added on January 16, 2018

California is one of only five Mediterranean climate regions in the world. (The others are the fynbos of South Africa, the matorral of Chile, the kwongan of Australia, and, of course, the Mediterranean.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Nature Conservancy > page 100

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How could TNC make the new strategy more concrete

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Here’s what the TNC did: Instead of talking in terms of land area, it talked about a “landscape.” … Five landscapes per year sounds more realistic than 2 million acres per year, and it’s much more concrete.

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Concreteness is an indespensable component of sticky ideas.

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Concrete language helps people, especially novices, understand new concepts. Abstraction is the luxury of the expert.

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Teachers take an existing schema–the dynamics of a six person ball game–and overlay a new layer of abstraction. [Using stick figures to count up players.] The researchers called this style of questioning Computing in Context. It is pretty much the opposite of “rote recall.”

Highlight (yellow) – Section Understanding Subtraction > page 105

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What is it about concreteness that makes ideas stick? The answer lies with the nature of our memories.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Velcro Theory of Memory > page 109

this is exactly the underlying theory of the ars memorativaAdded on January 16, 2018

If the phrase, “Hey Jude” drew a blank, please exchange this book for a Beatles album. You’ll be happier.”

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Velcro Theory of Memory > page 110

HA! What a great little aside here.Added on January 16, 2018

Highlight (yellow) – Section Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes > page 111

great example here of a teacher who used blue/brown eyes to discriminate on students in a classroom and making them sit in the back of the room.Added on January 16, 2018

Instead, Elliott [the teacher] turned prejudice into an _experience_. Think of the “hooks” involved: The sight of a friend suddenly snearing at you. The feel of a collar around your neck.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes > page 113

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But if concreteness is so powerful, why do we slip so easily into abstraction?

The reason is simple: because the difference between an expert and a novice is the ability to think abstractly. […] And here is where our classic villain, the Curse of Knowledge, inserts itself.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Path to Abstraction: The Blueprint and the Machine > page 113-114

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…the moral of the story is to find a “universal language,” one that everyone speaks fluently. Inevitably, that universal language will be concrete.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Path to Abstraction: The Blueprint and the Machine > page 115

think about the problem of the engineers talking with the manufacturers on the floor speaking a common languageAdded on January 16, 2018

Imagine how much harder it would have been to build a 727 whose goal was to be “the best passenger plane in the world.” [compared to it must seat 131 passengers, fly nonstop from Miami to NYC and land on a short sub-1 mile runway.]

Highlight (yellow) – Section Concrete Allows Coordination > page 116

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“Almost everything we [Stone Yamashita Partners, a small consulting firm in San Francisco] do is visceral and visual,” Keith yamashita says. The “product” of most consulting firms is often a PowerPoint presentation. At Stone Yamashita, it’s much more likely to be a simulation, an event, or a creative installation.

The presence of the portfolio made it easier for the venture capitalist to brainstorm, in the same what that focusing on “white things in our refrigerator” [versus white things in general] made it easier for us to brainstorm.

…Studzinski learned that moms and their kids valued predictability. […] But Hamburger Helper had more than thirdy different flavors, and moms struggled to find their favorites among the massive grocery-store displays. […] “Moms saw new flavors as risky,” she says.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Making Ideas Concrete > page 127

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By making Saddleback Sam and Samantha a living, breathing, concrete presence in the minds of the members of the Saddleback Church, the church has managed to reach 50,000 real Sams and Samanthas.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Making Ideas Concrete > page 129

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Of the six traits of stickiness that we review in this book, concreteness is perhaps the easiest to embrace. It may also be the most effective of th traits.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Making Ideas Concrete > page 129

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Chapter 4 Credible

Ulcers are caused by bacteria. The researchers, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, identified a tiny spiral-shaped type of bacteria [Helicobacter pylori] as the culprit.

Highlight (yellow) – > page 130

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The medical community expects important discoveries to come from Ph.D.s at research universities or professors at large, world-class medical centers. Internists do not cure diseases that affect 10 percent of the world’s population.

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Let’s pose the question in the broadest possible terms: What makes people believe ideas?

Highlight (yellow) – > page 132

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When we think of authorities who can add credibility, we tend to think of two kinds of people. The first kind is the expert–the kind of person whose wall is covered with framed credentials. […] Celebrities and other aspirations figures make up the second class of “authorities.” […] Why do we care that Michael Jordan likes… ..We care because we want to be like Mike,… We trust the recommendations of people whom we want to be like.

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This is why even horrible celebrity endorsements work for advertising.Added on January 16, 2018

Can we find external sources of credibility taht don’t involve celebrities or experts? [Yes.] We can tape the credibility of anti-authorities.

Highlight (yellow) – > page 134

example of Pam Laffin, the anti-smoking icon who had emphysema by 24 and used her personal story to show the vagaries of smoking.Added on January 16, 2018

[Greg] Connolly [director of tobacco control for the Massachussetts Department of Public Health] said, “What we’ve learned from previous campaigns is that telling stories using real people is the most compelling way.”

Highlight (yellow) – > page 135

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The takeaway is that it can be the _honesty and trustworthiness_ of our sources, not their _status_, that allows them to act as authorities. Sometimes antiauthorities are even better than authorities.

Highlight (yellow) – > page 137

Take the teens of the Parkland Shootings in March 2018 as examples for moving the needle on the gun control debate.Added on January 16, 2018

An expert on folk legends, Jan Brunvand, says that legends “acquire a good deal of their credibility and effect from their localized details.” A person’s knowledge of details is often a good proxy for her expertise. […] But concrete details don’t just lend credibility to the _authorities_ who provid them; they lend credibility to the idea itself. The Civil War anecdote, with lots of interesting details, is credible in _anyone’s_ telling. By making a claim tangible and concrete, details make it seem more real, more believable.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Power of Details > page 138

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In 1986, Jonathan Shedler and Melvin Manis […] created an experiment to simulat a trial. […] The jurors were asked to assess the fitness of a mother, Mrs. Johnson, and to decicd whether her seven-year-old son should remain in her care. […] So why did the details make a difference? They boosted the credibility of the argument. If I can mentally see the Darth Vader toothbrush, it’s easier for me to picture the boy diligently brushing his teeth in the bathroom, which in turn reinforces the notion that Mrs. Johnson is a good mother.

The use of vivid details is one way to create internal credibility–to weave sources of credibility into the ide aitself. Another way is to use statistics.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Beyond War > page 141

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“This approach is an ingenious way to convey a statistic.”

Highlight (yellow) – Section Beyond War > page 142

Talking about BB example: One BB: This is Hiroshima. Lot’s of BBs, this is the world’s stockpile (paraphrase)Added on January 16, 2018

The point was to hit people in the gut with the realization that this was a problem that was out of control. […] Statistics will, and should, almost always be used to illustrate a relationship. It’s more important for people to remember the relationship than the number.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Beyond War > page 143

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The soccer [team] analogy generates a human context for the statistics. it creates a sense of drama and a sense of movement. We can’t help but imagine the actions of the two players trying to score a goal, being opposed at every stage by the rest of their team. […] It relies on our schema of soccer teams and the fact that this schema is somehow cleaner, more well-defined, than our schema of organizations.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Human-Scale Principle > page 145

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Statistics aren’t inherently helpful; it’s the scale and context that make them so. […] The right scale changes everything.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Human-Scale Principle > page 146

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“A bag of popcorn has as much Vitamin J as 71 pounds of broccoli!” (We made this up.)

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Human-Scale Principle > page 147

I like that they made it J to make it feel false if retold.Added on January 16, 2018

When it comes to statistics, our best advice is to use them as input, not output. Use them to make up your mind on an issue.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Human-Scale Principle > page 147

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It’s the Sinatra Test: If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. [example of Safexpress delivering the Harry Potter books in India]

For an example that unites all three of the “internal credibility” sources–details, statistics, and the Sinatra test–we can turn to Bill McDonough, an environmentalist know for helping companies improve both the environment and the bottom line.

Instead, the commercials developed a brand-new source of credibility: the audience. Wendy’s outsourced its credibility to customers. […] To use scientific language, Wendy’s made a falsifiable claim.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Where’s the Beef? > page 157

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[on examples: Snapple slave ship and circle K (Kosher) as a Klan ownership symbol] This is how testable credentials can backfire–the “see for yourself” step can be valid, while the resulting conclusion can be entirely invalid.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Testable Credentials > page 158

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It’s much more powerful to experience the effect for yourself.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Testable Credentials > page 161

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NBA aids example

Highlight (yellow) – Section Rookie Orientation > page 162

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Chapter 5 Emotional

Mother Teresa once said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

Highlight (yellow) – > page 165

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When people think analytically, they’re less like to think emotionally. […] The mere act of calculation reduced people’s charity. Once we put on our analytical hat, we react to emotional appeals differently. We hinder our ability to feel.

Highlight (yellow) – > page 167

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For people to take action, they have to care. […] Charities have long since figured out the Mother Teresa effect–they know that donors respond better to individuals than to abstract causes.

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The good news is that to make people care about our ideas we don’t have to produce emotion from an absence of emotion. In fact, many ideas use a sort of piggybacking strategy, associating themselves with emotions that already exist.

Research conducted at Stanford and Yale shows that this process–exploiting terms and concepts for their emotional associations–is a common characteristic of communication. People tend to overuse any idea or concept that delivers an emotional kick. The research labeled this overuse “semantic stretch”.

The lesson for the rest of us is that if we want to make people care, we’ve got to tap into the things they care about. When everybody taps into the same thing, an arms race emerges. To avoid it, we’ve either got to shift onto new turf, as Thompson did, or find associations that are distinctive for our ideas.

In 1925, John Caples was assigned to write a headline for an advertisement promoting the correspondence music course offered by the U.S. School of Music. Caples had no advertising experience, but he was a natural. He sat at his typeswriter and pecked out the most famous headline in print-advertising history: “They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano…But When I Started to Play!”

Highlight (yellow) – Section Appealing to Self-interest > page 177

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Caples says companies often emphasize features when they should be emphasizing benefits. […] The old advertising maxim says you’ve got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don’t buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarte-inch holes so they can hang their children’s pictures.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Appealing to Self-interest > page 179

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We get uncomfortable looking at Caples’s handiwork: Many of his ads are shady. Deceptive. The Magnetic Personality Kit may enjoy a conscience-free existence, but most of us aspire to a working relationship with the truth.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Appealing to Self-interest > page 179

Magnetic Personality Kit people are reminiscent of Donald J. Trump and his administrationAdded on January 28, 2018

The first lesson is not to overlook self-interest. Jerry Weissman, a former TV producer and screenwriter who coaches CEOs in how to deliver speeches, says that you shouldn’t dance around the appeal to self-interest. He says that the WIIFY–“what’s in it for you,” pronounced wiffy-y–should be a central aspect of every speech.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Appealing to Self-interest > page 179

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Teachers are all too familiar with the student refrain “How are we ever going to use this?” In other words, what’s in it for me?

synopsis: 1982 psychologists persuasion study of homeowners. Being told about the benefits of cable vs. imagining how cable will improve your live.Added on January 28, 2018

Go back and count up the number of times the word “you” appears in each appeal.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Cable TV in Tempe > page 180

more in the second of imagining yourself….Added on January 28, 2018

The Arizona study, though, took it a step further. It asked people to visualize the feeling of security they would get by using [the product].

Highlight (yellow) – Section Cable TV in Tempe > page 180

This is just how the mnemotechniques workAdded on January 28, 2018

The research paper, when it was published, was subtitled “Does Imagining Make it So?” The answer was yes.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Cable TV in Tempe > page 180

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Compared with a typical mail-order ad, the “imagine cable television” appeal is a much more subtle appeal to self-interest. […] This finding suggest that it may be the tangibility, rather than the magnitude, of the benefits that makes people care. You don’t have to promise riches and sex appeal and magnetic personalities. It may be enough to promise reasonable benefits that people can easily imagine themselves enjoying.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Cable TV in Tempe > page 182

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Maslow’s Pyramid, or Maslow’s Heirarch of Needs.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Maslow > page 183

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Subsequent research suggests that the hierarchical aspect of Maslow’s theory is bogus–people persue all of these needs pretty much simultaneously.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Maslow > page 183

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He’s clear about his leadership mission: “As I see it, I am not just in charge of food service; I am in charge of Morale.”

Think about that: I am in charge of morale. In terms of Maslow’s hierarch, [Floyd] Lee is going for Transcendence.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Dining in Iraq > page 186

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It’s the attitude that makes the difference. […] Lee realizes that serving food is a job, but improving morale is a mission. Improving morale involves a creativity and experimentation and mastery. Serving food involves a ladle.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Dining in Iraq > page 187

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So, sometimes self-interest helps people care, and sometimes it backfires. What are we to make of this?

This has the example of firefighters needing a payout of a popcorn popper to watch fire prevention videoAdded on January 28, 2018

And perhaps the most important part of the story is this: “Group interest” is often a better predictor of political opinions than self-interest. Kinder says that in forming opinions people seem to ask not “What’s in it for me?” but rather, “What’s in it for my group?” Our group affiliation may be used based on race, class, religion, gender, region, political party, industry, or countless of other dimensions of difference.

and here’s where politics changed drastically in America after 1998Added on January 28, 2018

A related idea comes from James March, a professor at Stanford University, who proposes that we use two basic models to make decisions. The first model involves calculating consequences. We weigh our alternatives, assessing the value of each one, and we choose the alternative that yields us the most value. This model is the standard view of decision-making in economics classes: People are self-interested and rational. [..] The second model is quite different. It assumes that people make decisions based on identity. They ask themselves three questions: Who am I? What kind of situation is this? And what do people like me do in this kind of situation?

Instead, [Floyd Lee] helped create a kind of Pegasus identity: A Pegasus chef is in charge of morale, not food. You can imagine hundreds of decisions being made by staffers in the tent who think to themselves, What should a Pegasus person do in this situation?

And for those that don’t, they are mathematicians.Added on January 28, 2018

🔖 example about litter in Texas: “Don’t Mess with Texas”

Highlight (yellow) – Section Don’t Mess with Texas > page 195

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So far we’ve looked at three strategies for making people care: using associations (or avoiding associations, as the case may be), appealing to self-interest, and appealing to identity. …but we’ve got to watch out for our old nemesis, the Curse of Knowledge, which can interfere with our ability to implement them.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Music of Duo Piano > page 199

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One of the exercises was intended to help the leaders articulate and refine the core mission of their organization. The questions put to the attendees were difficult ones: Why does your organization exist? Can other organizations do what you do–and if so, what is it you do that is unique?

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Music of Duo Piano > page 199

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The mission to “preserve duo piano music” was effective and meaningful inside Murray Dranoff, but outside the organization it was opaque.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Music of Duo Piano > page 201

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It’s easy to forget taht you’re the tapper and the world is the listener.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Music of Duo Piano > page 201

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By asking “Why?” three times, the duo piano group moved from talking about what they were doing to why they were doing it.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Music of Duo Piano > page 201

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This tactic of the “Three Whys” can be useful in bypassing the Curse of Knowledge. (Toyota actually has a “Five Whys” process for getting to the bottom of problems on its production line. […] Asking “Why?” helps to remind us of the core values, the core principles, that underly our ideas.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Music of Duo Piano > page 201

Put into wiki in IWC. Why webmention? Fundamental to the interconnection of the web and how it works. LINKS! {example of IDEO creating simulations that make people realize problems exist}Added on January 28, 2018

simulations that drive employees to empathize with their customers.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Music of Duo Piano > page 202

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This realization–that empathy emerges from the particular rather than the pattern–bings us back full circle to the Mother Teresa quote… […] How can we make people care about our ideas? We get them to take off their Analytical Hats. We create empathy for specific individuals. We show how our ideas are associated with things that people already care about. We appeal to their self-interest, but we also appeal to their identities–not only to be the people they are right now but also to the people they would like to be.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Music of Duo Piano > page 203

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Chapter 6 Stories

Later, the group realized why the heart monitor misled them. It is designed to measure electrical activity, not actual heartbeats.

Highlight (yellow) – > page 205

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The story about the baby appears in a chapter called “The Power of Stories,” in [Gary] Klein’s book Sources of Power. Klein says that, in the environments he studies, stories are told and retold because they contain wisdom. Stories are effective teaching tools. The show how context can mislead people to make the wrong decisions.

Highlight (yellow) – > page 205

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The story’s power, then, is twofold: It provides simulation (knowledge about how to act) and inspiration (motivation to act). […] An emotional idea makes people care. And in this chapter we’ll see that the right stories make people act.

Highlight (yellow) – > page 206

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🔖 Shop Talk in the Xerox Lunchroom

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🔖 The Un-passive Audience

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Maybe financial gurus should be telling us to imagine that we’re filthy rich; instead, they should be telling us to replay the steps that led to our being poor.

Highlight (yellow) – > page 212

what about Napoleon Hill’s popularityAdded on January 28, 2018

Why does mental simulation work? It works because we can’t imagine events or sequences without evoking the same modules of the brain that are evoked in real physical activity.

Highlight (yellow) – > page 212

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Mental simulations help us manage emotions.

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Perhaps most surprisingly, mental simulation can also build skills. A review of thirty-five studies featuring 3,214 participants showed that mental practice alone–sitting quietly, without moving, and picturing yourself performing a task successfully from start to finish–improves performance significantly. […] Not surprisingly, mental practice is more effective when a task involves more mental activity (e.g., trombone playing) as opposed to physical actiivty (e.g., balancing), but the magnitude of gains from mental practice alone produced about two-thirds of the benefits of actual physical practice.

Highlight (yellow) – > page 213

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Stories are like flight simulators for the brain.

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The more that training simulates the actions we must take in the world, the more effective it will be.

Highlight (yellow) – > page 214

What about math problems?Added on January 28, 2018

We must fight the temptation to skip directly to the “tips” and leave out the story.

Jared reminds us that we don’t always have to create sticky ideas. Spotting them is often easier and more useful. What if history teachers were diligent about sharing teaching methods that worked brilliantly in teaching students?

Just as there are ad templates that have been proven effective, so, too, there are story templates that have been proven effective. Learning the templates gives our spotting ability a huge boost.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Art of Spotting > page 225

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Aristotle believed there were four primary dramatic plots: Simple Tragic, Simple Fortunate, Complex Tragic, and Complex Fortunate. Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru, lists twenty-five types of stories in his book: the modern epic, the disillusionment plot, and so on. When we finished sorting through a big pile of inspirational stories–a much narrower domain–we came to the conclusion that there are three basic plots: the Challenge plot, the Connection plot, and the Creativity plot.

These three basic plots can be used to classify more than 80 percent of the stories that appear in the original Chicken Soup collection. Perhaps more suprisingly, they can also be used to classify more than 60 percent of the stories published by People magazine about people who aren’t celebrities.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Art of Spotting > page 225

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The story of David and Goliath is the classic Challenge plot.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Challenge Plot > page 226

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There are variations of the Challenge plot that we all recognize: the underdog story, the rags-to-riches story, the triumph of sheer willpower over adversity.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Challenge Plot > page 226

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That [the story of the Good Samaritan] is what a Connection plot is all about. It’s a story about people who develop a relationship that bridges a gap–racial, class, ethnic, religious, demographic, or otherwise.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Connection Plot > page 228

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Where Challenge plots involve overcoming challenges, Connection plots are about our relationships with other people.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Connection Plot > page 228

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The Creativity plot involves someone making a mental breakthrough, solving a long-standing puzzle, or attacking a proble in an innovative way. It’s the MacGyver plot.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Creativity Plot > page 229

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In the history of the [Ingersoll Rand] Grinder Team, this story has become known as the Drag Test. The Drag Test is a Creativity plot that reinforced the team’s new culture. The Drag Test [dragging material behind their cars instead of traditional lab tests] implied, “We still need to get the right data to make decisions. We just need to do it a lot quicker.”

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Creativity Plot > page 230

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“How wonderful! They’ve stolen my idea. It’s become their idea!”

Highlight (yellow) – Section Stories at the World Bank > page 233

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In 2001, he [Stephen Denning] wrote a very insightful book called The Springboard. Denning defines a springboard story as a story that lets people see how an existing problem might change. Springboard stories tell people about possibilities.

One major advantage of springboard stories is that they combat skepticism and create buy-in.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Stories at the World Bank > page 233

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The problem is that when you hit listeners between the eyes they respond by fighting back. The way you deliver a message to them is a cue to how they should react. If you make an argument, you’r implicitly asking them to evaluate your argument–judge it, debate it, criticize it–and then argue back, at least in their minds. But with a story, Denning argues, you engage the audience–you are involving people with the idea, asking them to participate with you.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Stories at the World Bank > page 234

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A springboard story helps us problem-solve for ourselves. A springboard story is an exercise in mass customization–each audience member uses the story as a springboard to slightly different destinations.

Highlight (yellow) – Section Stories at the World Bank > page 234

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🔖 example: Gary Klein taking stories out of a conference as an overview of what happened instead of pithy one-liners.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Conference Storybook > page 237

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Stories can almost single-handedly defeat the Curse of Knowledge. In fact, they naturally embody most of the SUCCESs framework. Stories are almost always Concrete. Most of them have Emotional and Unexpected elements. The hardest part of using stories effectively is makig sure that they’re Simple–that they reflect your core message. […] Stories hav ethe amazing dual power to simulate and inspire. And most of the time we don’t even have to use much crativity to harness these powers–we just need to be ready to spot the good ones that life generates every day.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Conference Storybook > page 237

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Epilogue: What Sticks

[In 1946, Leo] Durocher [coach of the Dodgers] pointed at the Giant’s dugout and said, “Nice guys! Look over there. Do you know a nicer guy than [Giant’s manager] Mel Ott? Or any of the other Giants? Why, they’re the nicest guys in the world! And where are thy? In seventh place!” As recounted by Ralph Keyes in his book on misquotations, Nice Guys Finish Seventh… [this quote] emerged as a cynical comment on life: “Nice guys finish last.”

Highlight (yellow) – > page 238

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[Sherlock] Holmes never said, “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

Highlight (yellow) – > page 239

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…in making ideas stick, the audience gets a vote. The audience may change the meaning of your idea, as happened with Durocher. The audience may actually improve your idea, as was the case with Sherlock Holmes. O the audience may retain some of your ideas and jettison others, as with [James] Carville [,who used had three phrases: “It’s the economy, stupid”, “Change vs. more of the same” and “Don’t forget health care”, only one of which stuck.]

The barrier to idea-spotting is that we tend to process anecdotes differently than abstractions.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Power of Spotting > page 241

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…we can also put on Core Idea Glasses, allowing us to filter incoming ideas from that perspective.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Power of Spotting > page 241

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If you’re a great spotter, you’ll always trump a great creator. Why? Because the world will always produce more great ideas than any single individual, even the most creative one.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Power of Spotting > page 242

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[Talking about Chip’s student exercise in class:] In the average one-minute speech, the typical student uses 2.5 statistics. Only one studen in ten tells a story. Those are the spaking statistics. The “remembering” statistics, on the other hand, are almost mirror image: When students are asked to recall the speeches, 63 percent remember the stories. Only 5 percent remember any individual statistic.

Furthermore, almost no correlation emerges between “speaking talent” and the ability to make ideas stick.

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Speakers and the Stickers > page 243

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The stars of stickiness are the students who made their case by telling stories or by tapping into emotion…

Highlight (yellow) – Section The Speakers and the Stickers > page 243

double entendre for this book as they’ve previously mentioned “tapping” out music….Added on January 28, 2018

The first is decision paralysis–the anxiety and irrationality that can emerge from excessive choice or ambiguous situations. […] To beat decision paralysis, communicators have to do the hard work of finding the core.

Highlight (yellow) – Section More Villains > page 244

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Getting a message across has two stages: The Answer stage and the Telling Others stage. In the Answers stage, you use your expertise to arrive at the idea that you want to share. Doctors study for a decade to be capable of giving the Answer. Business managers may deliberate for months to arrive at the Answer.

Here’s the rub: The same factors that worked to your advantage in the Answer stage will backfire on you during the Telling Others stage. To
get the Answer, you need expertise, but you can’t dissociate expertise from the Curse of Knowledge. You know things that others down’t know, and you can’t remember what it was like not to know those things. So when you get around to sharing the Answer, you’ll need to communicate as if your audience were you.

Highlight (yellow) – Section More Villains > page 245

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There is a curious disconnect between the amount of time we invest in training people how to arrive at the Answer and the amout of time we invest in training them how to Tell Others. It’s easy to graduate from medical school or an MBA program without ever taking a class in communication. College professors take dozens of courses in their areas of expertise but none on how to teach. A lot of engineers would scoff at a training program about Telling Others.

Highlight (yellow) – Section More Villains > page 245

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For an idea to stick, for it to be useful and lasting, it’s got to make the audience:
1. Pay attention UNEXPECTED
2. Understand and remember it CONCRETE
3. Agree/Believe CREDIBLE
4. Care EMOTIONAL
5. Be able to act on it STORY

Guide to highlight colors

Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category belowOrange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare wordGreen–Reference to readBlue–Interesting QuoteGray–Typography ProblemRed–Example to work through

The esteemed academic discusses Trump supporters who stay faithful to him even when he works against their material best interests and well-being.

Dr. Lakoff does a solid job of dissecting Trump’s communication style and providing some relatively solid advice to journalists and media outlets who aim to disrupt what Trump is attempting to accomplish. The discussion of morality and its role in our political system, albeit brief, was incredibly interesting.

In the last third of the interview, Lakoff provides an interesting reframing of much of the public/private case that Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson make in their recent book American Amnesia.

I can see people like Jay Rosen and Keith Olbermann appreciating these interviews if they haven’t seen them.

This was so solid that I actually watched it a second time. It may also be time to dig into some of Lakoff’s other writings and research as well. Some of it I’ve read and seen before in general terms, but it’s probably worth delving into more directly.

I love that by following certain people, my timeline has become a stream of interesting and entertaining information. I love that sometimes I am able to fit my little publication just so into the 140 characters given to me.

In the 1870s Ewald Hering in Prague and Samuel Butler in London laid the foundations. Butler's work was later taken up by Richard Semon in Munich, whose writings inspired the young Erwin Schrodinger in the early decades of the 20th century.

As it was published, I had read Kevin Hartnett’s article and interview with Christoph Adami The Information Theory of Life in Quanta Magazine. I recently revisited it and read through the commentary and stumbled upon an interesting quote relating to the history of information in biology:

Polymath Adami has ‘looked at so many fields of science’ and has correctly indicated the underlying importance of information theory, to which he has made important contributions. However, perhaps because the interview was concerned with the origin of life and was edited and condensed, many readers may get the impression that IT is only a few decades old. However, information ideas in biology can be traced back to at least 19th century sources. In the 1870s Ewald Hering in Prague and Samuel Butler in London laid the foundations. Butler’s work was later taken up by Richard Semon in Munich, whose writings inspired the young Erwin Schrodinger in the early decades of the 20th century. The emergence of his text – “What is Life” – from Dublin in the 1940s, inspired those who gave us DNA structure and the associated information concepts in “the classic period” of molecular biology. For more please see: Forsdyke, D. R. (2015) History of Psychiatry 26 (3), 270-287.

For those interested in reading more on this historical tidbit, I’ve dug up a copy of the primary Forsdyke reference which first appeared on arXiv (prior to its ultimate publication in History of Psychiatry [.pdf]):

Abstract: Today’s ‘theory of mind’ (ToM) concept is rooted in the distinction of nineteenth century philosopher William Clifford between ‘objects’ that can be directly perceived, and ‘ejects,’ such as the mind of another person, which are inferred from one’s subjective knowledge of one’s own mind. A founder, with Charles Darwin, of the discipline of comparative psychology, George Romanes considered the minds of animals as ejects, an idea that could be generalized to ‘society as eject’ and, ultimately, ‘the world as an eject’ – mind in the universe. Yet, Romanes and Clifford only vaguely connected mind with the abstraction we call ‘information,’ which needs ‘a vehicle of symbols’ – a material transporting medium. However, Samuel Butler was able to address, in informational terms depleted of theological trappings, both organic evolution and mind in the universe. This view harmonizes with insights arising from modern DNA research, the relative immortality of ‘selfish’ genes, and some startling recent developments in brain research.

Comments: Accepted for publication in History of Psychiatry. 31 pages including 3 footnotes. Based on a lecture given at Santa Clara University, February 28th 2014, at a Bannan Institute Symposium on ‘Science and Seeking: Rethinking the God Question in the Lab, Cosmos, and Classroom.’

The original arXiv article also referenced two lectures which are appended below:

How a mathematical breakthrough from the 1960s now powers everything from spacecraft to cell phones.

Concurrent with the recent Pluto fly by, Alex Riley has a great popular science article on PBS that helps put the application of information theory and biology into perspective for the common person. Like a science version of “The Princess Bride”, this story has a little bit of everything that could be good and entertaining: information theory, biology, DNA, Reed-Solomon codes, fossils, interplanetary exploration, mathematics, music, genetics, computers, and even paleontology. Fans of Big History are sure to love the interconnections presented here.